I just wanted to post a short note to let everyone know that I am taking a hiatus from blogging (obviously, considering I haven’t posted anything new in months!). I could go on and on about how my new position at work is eating up lots of my formerly leisure time or the fact that I’m pursuing new interests and old passions and have become very involved with animal rescue efforts in my area, but the long and short of it is: I need a break.

The site will remain open for archives and when I’m ready, I’ll resume blogging again. Thanks again to everyone for helping make The-F-Word the community it has become.

Spousal/partner weight gain is a frequent letter seen among the sundry list of gripes and complaints seen by advice columnists and few columnists get it right with their responses. The Washington Post’s Carolyn Hax has always been a moderate voice of compassion when it comes to such weighty issues. She’s on vacation this week and readers are giving the advice. Here’s a gem from today’s column in regards to a previous letter from a man who blamed his infidelity on his wife’s recent weight gain .

I’ve always believed that every woman is beautiful. Every woman. If I don’t see the beauty in one, that’s MY problem, not hers. It’s up to me to work harder to see the beauty, not up to her to make herself live up to whatever my standards might be.

A friend of mine shared this on Facebook and I thought it was too good not to share. I heard this type of conversation far too many times in the office I worked at until last year, and I’m sure many of you can relate.

Rachel’s $.02 cents: Charlynn and I posted this to the blog at virtually the same time. Great minds and all… This video be even funnier if I haven’t seen or even engaged in scenarios almost EXACTLY LIKE IT at work before. Anyone else have to suffer an office dieter like this one who’s fishing for compliments and/or weight loss reinforcement, or been sucked into diet talk at the office?

Jennifer Barnes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Teeside University, is looking for men and women between the ages of 18-65 who speak fluent English to participate in an online eating disorder survey. Jennifer explains:

This study is looking for any relationship between symptoms of eating disorders, beliefs people hold about themselves, and the ways in which people protect themselves against stress. Therefore, the study will involve asking questions about people’s thoughts and feelings about eating and about the relationships in their lives, as well as questions about people’s attitudes. It is hoped that this study will further understanding of the characteristics of individuals with symptoms of an eating disorder, and this information would be useful in order to inform therapeutic practice. In addition, this study will hopefully contribute to the body of research involving men with symptoms of eating disorders. However, please note that people of any gender can take part in this study.

You do not need to have an official eating disorder diagnosis to participate. The survey should take about 30 minutes to complete. Participants will be entered into a drawing to win a prize of £50. h/t Men Get Eating Disorders Too.

I’m still feeling all warm and fuzzy from the overthrow of Prop 8 in California, but there’s other good news to report for this week’s Feel Good Friday. We’ve mentioned before the blog Operation Beautiful and I’m glad to see it now making more national headlines. The mission of Operation Beautiful is simple: all you need is a pen and a piece of paper… So says site editor Caitlin Boyle, who’s on a mission to leave positive, body-affirming notes in public spaces and invites you to do the same. Since starting the blog last year, Caitlin has received an overwhelming outpouring of support from people (mostly women) also sick of the constant bombardment of “fat talk” and has now chronicled some of the messages she’s received in a new book, Operation Beautiful: Transforming the Way You See Yourself One Post-it Note at a Time. MSNBC has posted an excerpt from that book here, which released in stores this week. You’ll have to go to the MSNBC link to read the entire exerpt, but I wanted to repost some of Caitlin’s basic tips for ending fat talk here. Caitlin also appeared yesterday on The Today Show — catch that clip here.

Stop your Fat Talk in its tracks! In addition to consciously correcting yourself, try wearing a rubber band around your wrist and give it a firm “snap!” whenever you feel a negative thought creeping in. Think of it like coating your nails in spicy polish when you’re trying to stop biting them! The rubber band technique is a gentle physical reminder of the internal damage you are doing to yourself when you Fat Talk.

Identify the real issue behind your Fat Talk. Is it really about your body or is it about something else entirely — like an emotion you’re having trouble expressing? Many women use Fat Talk as a way to express sadness or frustration. Find a more positive outlet for your emotions, such as talking to a friend, writing in your diary or exercising.

Make a list of your positive qualities — both inside and out — and tape them to your bathroom mirror so you can read it whenever you need a boost. Do not be ashamed to celebrate your amazing qualities!

What are some other ways that have helped you put an end to the fat talk loop in your head? How do you react to fat talk by others?

Could you stay seriously romantically involved with someone who didn’t care about food the way you do?

That’s the question posed over at the CNN blog Eatocracy and surprisingly, the majority of respondents say that it is indeed a dealbreaker in a relationship. The gist of the post seems to be aimed more at epicurean foodies who look for like-minded palates in a mate, but it’s worth exploring other aspects of dietary discordance too, like sustainable food or vegetarian/vegan diets. I had been vegetarian for a little over two years when I met Brandon. Our whirlwind relationship moved quickly and I seriously think that the first inkling I felt that hey… this could actually be the one started when I looked in his refrigerator freezer that first weekend and saw at least five different varieties of Morningstar Farms veggie burgers lining the shelves. Brandon wasn’t vegetarian then, but had undergone a kind of mid-life crisis months earlier and had ditched his fast food diet for veggie burgers and taken up running again.

Food played a large role in our budding relationship those first few months. I was on the tail end of my recovery from an eating disorder and Brandon was a bachelor who cooked most of his meals in a microwave. I turned him on to sesame rye crackers and hummus, veggie taco salads and homemade healthy pizza. He reintroduced me to chocolate, bread and ooey gooey cheesy pizza from our favorite local pizza parlor. I tried not to evangelize vegetarianism, but since we planned meals and grocery shopped together, our meals tended to be vegetarian. In fact, I can recall only two instances after we met in which Brandon ate meat — once when he and his brother dined out together and without me and again when we dined out with friends at a restaurant with a very limited veggie-friendly menu. Within six months after we moved in together, he went completely vegetarian. My mom, who was slow to understand my vegetarianism for the longest time, chided me for “making” Brandon give up bacon. “Let that boy eat some meat already!” she’d scold. True, I didn’t exactly relish the idea of kissing Brandon after he’d eaten charred animal flesh nor did I want to see it in my refrigerator, but what my mom didn’t understand is that I didn’t force Brandon into anything; he went vegetarian because he loves me and knew how important it was to me.

Vegetarianism, however, is the point in which our shared taste in food ends. I’m both health- and environmentally-conscious and also try to follow a relatively low glycemic diet for health reasons. Brandon? Eh, not so much. I love green vegetables — kale, spinach, broccoli, okra, Brussel sprouts, salads… The only vegetables Brandon eats are the “bad” white ones — corn and potatoes. He can tolerate certain vegetables in things, like soups and stir-frys or on pizza, but you will never find him digging into a plate of freshly steamed vegetables on their own. Here’s an example of our different palates: Neither of us are foodies nor do we even really like to cook. One evening I was busy with work and other things and left dinner up to him. After a half hour of rooting around in the cabinets and refrigerator, I asked him if he had any ideas. “Veggie chicken nuggets?” he suggested. “And….?” I asked. He shuffled his feet. “Uhh, French fries?” “How about Quorn chicken with a baked potato and steamed broccoli?” I asked. He wrinkled his nose.

We try to prepare dinners that both will like and find satisfying, but often times we’ll also each fix our own dinners, too. A veggie burger or chicken patty for him; a veggie burger or veggie chicken and a side of steamed veggies for me. It may seem odd to some, but it works for us. How about you? Do you and your partner share similar or completely different dietary tastes? Could you ever be in a relationship with someone who isn’t on the same page as you when it comes to food?

I meant to post this the other week, but that pesky thing called life got in the way and I back-burnered it. Newsweek has put together an awesome special feature on the advantages (and yes, even disadvantages) of being beautiful and how it can affect our lives, careers and health. There are a lot of great multimedia links to follow, but here’s a few that caught my attention:

I think that most of us would agree that lookism is A Bad Thing, but surprisingly, in a survey conducted by Newsweek, only 46 percent of the public said they would favor a law making hiring discrimination based on appearance illegal. Is this a case of a deluded public who’s bought the beauty myth hook, line and sinker? Or could it be a pragmatic public realizing the practicalities of such a law difficult to enforce? Your thoughts on this and the other columns and galleries in Newsweek’s special feature on beauty?

I took a week off work this week, but it’s more like a staycation than a vacation. The pregnant foster cat was considerate enough to give birth yesterday morning, so now I can get to that impossibly long to-do list I’ve been mentally tabulating since, oh, February. I probably won’t be online much this week, so I thought it would be a good chance to revisit some of the more popular posts featured on the blog in the three-plus years it’s been online. The first to be (re)featured is this November, 2007 interview with Gina Kolata, award-winning science and medicine reporter with The New York Times and author.

Kolata’s career in journalism began when she joined Science magazine in 1971, where she selected reviewers for manuscripts. She eventually became a writer and then senior writer. She also wrote for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including Science Magazine, Smithsonian, GQ and Ms. Magazine. She earned her bachelor’s degree in microbiology and her master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland. She studied molecular biology at M.I.T. in a Ph.D. program.

In Ultimate Fitness, you set out to discover the truth of the exercise industry and found much of fitness claims to be misleading. In your most recent work, Rethinking Thin, you blast those in the obesity industry, who promote the idea that overweight is unhealthy and diet and exercise to be effective. What prompted your interest in the study of diet, exercise and weight-loss?

I got interested in the exercise industry because I spend a lot of time exercising and at gyms and I kept hearing all sorts of things that did not seem to make a lot of scientific sense, like the “fat-burning zone.” I was interested in diet and weight loss because of my experience as a reporter. I have been writing about major research on weight and weight loss for decades, and these often involved discoveries that seemed pathbreaking. Yet the public, and the diet industry, kept on saying that all you have to do to lose weight is just eat less and exercise more.

What are some of the biggest core beliefs of dieting and weight-loss that you found to be incorrect?

The idea that anyone can be arbitrarily thin is at the top of the list. Then comes the idea that thinner people could easily be fat if they just let themselves go. Or the idea that people gain weight because they have emotional problems and are using food to fill an unmet need. Or that if you just walk for 20 minutes or so a day those unwanted pounds would melt away. Or that if you take junk foods out of the schools and re institute pe kids would not gain weight.

It has been months since I’ve posted, and I apologize. I’ve been ridiculously busy… first it was school, then graduation, working two jobs, doing proposal edits for my agent, and now I finally have a minute to breathe. I have so many posts in my head, so I guess I’ll start with my personal life and recovery. About six months ago, my partner decided (operative word) that she was going to become spiritually enlightened through Buddhism. I couldn’t have been more happy. Through this process, she has drastically cut out unhealthy food from her diet, essentially cleansing her mind, body, and soul. She has been a long-time sufferer of IBS, so she had a reason to change her nutritional regimen. Since she made the decision to change her eating, she has never looked back. Of course, this has caused her to lose quite a bit of weight, and she was already thin.

Enter my insanity.

As an ED in recovery, I, naturally, think that this can’t be good. My thoughts race. She’s be in denial. She doesn’t realize she’s doing this on purpose. She really wants to lose more. She must have an eating disorder. So, I allude to her that she’s becoming anorexic and she gets offended. Okay so that’s my first clue that she does not have an ED. Moreover, she tells me that most people who tell her she’s too thin are people who only wish they could eat as healthily as she.

Enter my reality.

She is right. I was completely jealous. After struggling for years with the ED, then struggling with mental obsession (although it has lessened) in recovery, I was dumbfounded how, in one swoop, she just decided to completely change her life. Just how is it that one can evolve so quickly? While she is not in a recovery program, her behaviors seem to mimic the 3rd step of all 12-step programs… Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. I’m no longer a 12-stepper, but the third step just keeps popping up in my brain. Another phrase embedded in my brain from “the rooms” was that we had a god-sized hole that we were trying to fill up with food, alcohol, people, etc.

What I’m learning is that god-sized holes aren’t just for addicts, and my partner has shown me that many spiritual solutions exist outside the rooms of AA/OA–no matter how much people in the rooms tell you otherwise. Second, another major difference between my partner and I (besides being separate people, lol) is I’m the one with the eating disorder. Solely losing weight does not make for an eating disorder–a symptom of an ED, yes. But, as we all know, EDs are full of biopsychosocial/spiritual complexities, and considered a disease by most medical professionals.

I still have food patterns that bother me… though, it’s my perfection and ED voice that are most bothered by them. By non-ED standards, my food intake is healthy. So, because I have this “disease” hanging over my head, does that mean I cannot make a decision and evolve overnight? It certainly makes me wonder. I haven’t been able to do it so far, so probably not. As “normal” as I try to be and free myself from the ED identity, it seems to always be hangin’ around in some form or another. I remember in treatment professionals telling me that as many years as one is in the ED it takes an equal amount of time in recovery to undo the ED mindset. So, I have about a decade to go I guess! Something to look forward to, lol.

Plus-size model and body image darling Crystal Renn and blogger Leslie Goldman appeared on the Today show to discuss the recent airbrushing scandal of Crystal by photographer Nicholas Routzen. I found her to be extremely smart and eloquent in her response to the situation, as well as to the pervasive issues plaguing plus-size models.

Well, I was shocked. When I saw the pictures, I think I was silent for a good five minutes, staring with my mouth open. I don’t know what was done to those photos or who did it, but they look retouched to me. And listen, everybody retouches, but don’t make me into something I’m not.

I look like me; I look strong. But in the new pictures…well, that body doesn’t look like my body. It doesn’t. Having had an eating disorder, I know what that very thin body looks like on me, and it’s not something I find attractive. It’s not something I aspire to.

I feel completely confident in my own health because I know I don’t look like that, but even to see it in an image was really disturbing to me.

Airbrushing a model beyond recognition is unethical in more ways than one, but given Crystal’s hard-fought battle against anorexia and her public campaign to raise awareness of the disorder, this act of virtually whittling her back to those dark days is especially heinous. Even more ironically, photographer Nicholas Routzen shot and altered these images to promote his nonprofit charity Fashion for Passion, which supports arts and music programs for children. Ehem, Nicholas? It may be a little difficult to inspire a passion for the arts in children who are too obsessed with looking like the unrealistic and unattainable airbrushed images they see in magazines and the media.